Can Some Socialism Be a Good Thing?
In September 1848, during the founding of the Second Republic in France, French legislators were discussing ways to alleviate the problem of French unemployment. The French economy was in a perilous state following the turmoil of the February revolution that had overthrown the French monarchy and left the society and economy in turmoil. Many French legislators favored “make-work” projects, whereby the new government could allegedly wipe out unemployment and give the economy a boost by putting unemployed Frenchmen to work on grandiose public-works projects.
Such political artifices have become routine in our day, as the Obama administration demonstrated, in the wake of the Great Recession, by spending huge sums of money on public works to provide jobs that would allegedly give our shattered economy a boost. But what is today widely regarded as standard public policy — use of public funds and resources in an effort to create jobs and redirect market energies — was in the mid-19th century very radical stuff. During the September debate in Paris, one famous legislator, Alexis de Tocqueville, dared to call such measures what they really were: socialism.
Tocqueville, like his contemporary (and fellow French legislator) Frédéric Bastiat, was a staunch opponent of the subversive dogma of socialism, which only recently had begun taking root in Europe, and had been the inspiration for the wave of revolutions that had swept the continent earlier in the year. As Tocqueville cautioned his fellow legislators:
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